The Names
The pages in this section provide a complete list of the species of birds of the world, including Corrigenda, Updates of Taxonomy, English Names, Distributions, with Comments and Footnotes linked to particular species on the main lists.
It is our intention to reflect taxonomic progress in all regions of the world, address differences between this list and those of regional classification committees, and also to provide comments about controversial English names.
In August 2007 we began the process of annotating the list starting with alignments with the AOU Checklist for North and Middle America. In October 2007 we added taxonomic updates based on a comparison of the IOC species list with the classification of the AOU's South American Checklist Committee (SACC). The species taxonomy of South American birds is undergoing a major review of the status of populations recognized historically as either subspecies or species.
A major upgrade, led by Taxonomic Editor David Donsker, was released as Version 1.5 on January 17, 2008. It includes, to the best of our current knowledge, all proposed species splits and taxonomic changes published in peer-reviewed ornithological journals in 2005-2007, with necessary adjustments of distributions. It includes additional alignments with decisions by the SACC on the taxonomy of Neotropical bird species. It also takes major step towards aligning IOC species taxonomy with that of draft list of world birds of Birdlife International (BLI). Additional proposed splits (and lumps) are under consideration. Also on our desks are many proposed changes of bird genera. We will address these comprehensively in a future update.
This update adds to the IOC list 156 species that have been approved or are under "official" review.We strived to avoid uncritical acceptance of all available proposed splits, and yet to be progressive with splits that are recognized or likely to be accepted by regional authorities. These additions extend the IOC list beyond the taxonomy of Dickinson (2003) that was our starting foundation.
Taxonomic Updates are summarized by date on a separate web page.
Updates to the IOC list posted here are first noted under Comments with more detail in the linked Footnote at the bottom of the page. These include Potential Splits (PS) for those that are not yet "officially" recognized, Actual Splits (AS) that are "officially" accepted by leading authorities, Potential Lumps (PL) for species that may be DELETED from our list (but are retained pending formal release of the next edition), Actual Lumps (AL) for species that are conspecific with another and will be DELETED in the next edition, Generic changes (GEN) to conform to ongoing revisions, English names corrections and changes (ENG), Distribution changes (DIS) especially to accommodate splits of additional species, taxonomic comments (TAX), and new relationships of phylogeny (PHY) informed by recent DNA studies.
The footnotes include citations to published authorities detailed separately in Checklist References.
The list is subdivided primarily by Order and for Passeriformes by sets of related families. Presently, the sequence of families follows that in Birds of the World, Recommended English Name, and on the Excel files with that work. Forthcoming will be revisions of higher order relationships that correspond to phylogenies portrayed in the Tree of Life Project.
Please use the edit/find tool on your browser to locate a species on a particular page.